← Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Productivity Paradox: Why Less Is More With Oliver Burkeman
01:03:35
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- [00:01]
A
What's up everybody? Chris Vernon here and welcome to a new season of the NBA and the Mismatch. And huge welcome as well to my new co host, Dave Jacoby. I can't wait to link with you twice a week, every Tuesday and Friday right here on the Mismatch to break.
- [00:17]
B
Down everything that's happening in the league.
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A
Who's playing well, who we loved, who we loathed, trade rumors, team dysfunction. We've got you covered right here. So follow us, subscribe, and hit us with those five star ratings on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And also don't forget to follow us on social media. That's Ringer NBA. And check out the full Mismatch episodes with the two handsomest podcasters in the history of podcasting, right on The Ringer NBA YouTube channel. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. The new year brings new health goals and wealth goals. Protecting your identity is an important step. LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, LifeLock's restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Resolve to make identity, health and wealth part of your New year's goals with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com podcast Terms apply this episode is brought to you by Amazon. Sometimes the most painful part of getting sick is the getting better part. Waiting on hold for an appointment, sitting in crowded waiting rooms, Standing in line at the pharmacy that's painful. Amazon one Medical and Amazon Pharmacy Remove those painful parts of getting better with things like 247 virtual visits and prescriptions delivered to your door thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and AmazonOne Medical Healthcare just got less painful. So here's a scenario. It's Monday and you open up whatever calendar or planner or to do list you use to organize the essential activities of the upcoming week. There's a large project due Thursday, an important meeting on Wednesday. Your 9 to 5 is chockablock with meetings. Your kid has a school function Tuesday, and there are holiday gifts to buy before Friday. And just when you're pretty sure your week couldn't possibly take one more featherweight of responsibility, the H Vac unit sputters to a stop, requiring a call to the local heating and cooling guys, which obliterates four hours of Monday. Now you can tell yourself that this week is just cursed. Or you can tell yourself the truth, which is that feeling an imbalance between the time you have and the time you wish you had isn't really a curse. It's something more like the definition of Being alive to see life clearly in this way is what I've come to think of as. As Oliver Berkman Brain. One of the joys of doing this show is that sometimes I'll read a book that strikes me as just really deep and wise and profound and I can call up the author and ask to talk about their work in front of a microphone. And one of the deeper and more profound authors that I've been lucky to talk to in the last few years during the show is Oliver Berkman, the author of 4000 Weeks and the new book Meditations for Mortals, which he opens with the following. This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you're never going to sort your life out. It's about how marvelously productive you become when you give up the grim faced quest to make yourself more and more productive and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you'll never get around to more than a handful of them and that strictly speaking, you don't absolutely need to do any of them at all. It's about how absorbing, even magical life becomes when you accept how fleeting and unpredictable it is, how much less isolating it feels to stop hiding your flaws and failures from others and how liberating it can be to understand that your greatest difficulties in life might never be fully resolved. End quote. Today, in what's becoming a bit of a holiday tradition on this show, we welcome Oliver back to talk about his new book, Doing More by Doing Less, the dubious benefits of scheduling and the true sense of freedom that ironically comes from accepting our limitations. I'm Derek Thompson, this is plain English, Oliver Berkman. Welcome back to the show.
- [05:00]
B
Thanks so much for having me back.
- [05:02]
A
So before we dive into your latest work, I think it'd be useful for people coming to you for the first time to get a refresher in the basics of your very particular outlook on life that you first spelled out in your book 4,000 weeks. So if you could, what is 4,000 weeks a literal reference to? And what sort of life does 4,000 weeks ask us to live?
- [05:25]
B
Well, 4,000 weeks is very approximately the average life expectancy in the developed world these days. I rounded it down to get the nice titular figure with three zeros in it, but that's approximately what it is. I think there's something powerful about thinking about our finite time in weeks. We both don't get very many of them and yet it's also quite easy, it seems to me to wonder where the last Four or five or six of them went all the time. They seem to pass pretty rapidly. I think the basic idea of that book, I suppose, is just that we spend a lot of time and a lot of effort in flight from our limitations, from the limited quantity of time we get and the limited control we have over how that time unfolds. And I sort of argue that it's that running away from it's that emotional avoidance of finitude that causes a huge proportion of our troubles with time, our stress and overwhelm and distractibility and all the rest of it, and that actually there's incredible power in sort of embracing limitations, in looking them full in the face, and sort of more fully inhabiting our position as finite humans instead of constantly trying to optimize or efficiency. Ize our way out of them.
- [06:55]
A
That's a lovely summary. It's very much resonant with what I took away from the book, which is that, ironically, seeking freedom requires us to accept limitations. And there's, in a weird way, an enormous amount of freedom in accepting the truth of our limitations. That's sort of the normal person's summary of the book. For a sicko who reads philosophy and listens to philosophy podcasts like me, I'd say what I really appreciated about the book is that I have loved and have always loved existential philosophy, going from Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer to the new guys like Camus. And I think of your philosophy, in a way, as being a little bit like existentialism mugged by common sense. You don't rely on inscrutable German like Heidegger, thankfully, you don't rely on his nauseous politics. But you find a way of making the wisdom of existential philosophy incredibly memorable to modern audiences. And there's an aspect of that that I'd love to talk about, really, through the rest of this show. So your new, lovely book, Meditations for Mortals, is organized under several dozen mantras. You call them meditations. I'm going to think of them as mantras for the purpose of this question. And I want to start with my favorite mantra from the book, and that is, it's worse than you think. It's worse than you think. I think there's enough wisdom packed into those five words that we could spend several hours talking about them. But let's just peel back the first layer. What are you talking about? It's worse than you think. And how on earth is something so cosmetically depressing supposed to be useful to people?
- [08:43]
B
Well, I'm just coming at this as something that I have, in a very personal way, sort of been through and come out to some extent the other side of, to understand why it is so sort of liberating and empowering to understand the sense in which our situation as finite humans is worse than. Is worse than we think. I think there's all sorts of contexts in which we see ourselves as having a very, very difficult struggle to stay on top of everything and to feel in control in the way that we think we need to. So pick a few obvious examples. It feels really, really difficult to stay on top of all the to dos that feel like they need staying on top of. It feels really, really difficult to sort of get to the point where you feel like, you know, enough to be a really competent parent or a competent spouse, or, you know, to understand what makes other people tick and to really sort of get a handle on everything, get into the driver's seat of life. And my argument is that, you know, these things are not actually really, really difficult. These things are, in some important sense, impossible. There will always be too much to do. There'll always be more things that we could meaningfully spend our time on than we will be able to devote our actual time to. There will always be aspects of any other person, especially those closest to us, that sort of mystify us. And trying to understand how to be a parent sort of changes underneath you every single week. Right? Because the children in question change. And I think that in that transition from very difficult to impossible, there is incredible liberation. I mean, to put it on a very superficial level, it's just because you get to stop fighting to do something impossible, and you get to stop postponing the real meaning of life to the point at which you have conquered this challenge. And you get to relax about that and to just plunge in right now into what it is that you wanted to do with your time.
- [10:51]
A
You quote the late Zen master Hun Ju Kennett born.
- [10:54]
B
I was just gonna say, yeah, right.
- [10:56]
A
So I'm glad that I could steal the words right out of your mouth. Let me quote your own words back to you. And then I would love for you to help us make this idea even more concrete. So you say that quote. She had a very vivid way of capturing the sense of inner release that comes from grasping just how intractable our human limitations really are. Her teaching style, she liked to say, was not to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it, the burden down. I love this idea for its strangeness the idea that when we're obsessed with a problem, when we're working it out in our head, when we're fixating on it or ruminating about it, if the problem is located in the past, there's a certain kind of power to making the problem seem even heavier, even more impossible than it is. Rather than being a fixable problem, wherein, thinking about it enough, we'll solve the problem for ourself. Speaking personally, Oliver, making this really concrete, because I could talk philosophy for a long time, but let's make this a really hardened example here. Why does this quote appeal to you? How does this quote make contact with your life?
- [12:19]
B
I think that I have spent many, many years of my, especially my early adulthood and I'm sure there's plenty of traces in it, in me of it still today with this feeling of being sort of on the back foot, that if I could just apply a bit more self discipline, if I could just find the right system, if I could just be a bit less of a procrastinatory or distractible loser in this or that domain, finally I could get to this point, this sort of plateau or summit or whatever the metaphor is, where I could relax, where things would be plain sailing, where I could feel like I was a sort of adequate human being at last. I sort of earned my right to exist and I could just carry on in a much less stressful way. And I think that this is just to get impersonal about it for one minute. I think this is one example, this feeling of never quite being good enough or efficient enough or emotionally intelligent enough. All sorts of different domains. I think it's one example of this basic idea that Zen Buddhism in general seems to me to be very eloquent about, which is that our struggle, our problem in life is so often thought, thinking that there ought to be a solution to our situation rather than not having yet found the solution. So those words of G. Kennett about making the burden so heavy that you put it down. I still get kind of goosebumps, shivers when I reflect on them. Because it is this sense of like, oh, all right. The reason I haven't got to this place where I'm, you know, infinitely capable and infinitely efficient and infinitely understanding of what's going on in the world. I mean, as soon as you put it into words, it's pretty obvious why. But, like, it's because you can't get there. And because that is a mirage. That's something that actually keeps us from turning to face the life we're in and rolling up our sleeves and doing all the things that we could do with it. So it's that combination of relaxing with kind of empowering. I think on a personal level, a lot of what I'm doing in my writing is trying to find, is trying to deal with a history of life as a sort of anxious person or a sort of neurotic person or whatever, and find peace of mind, but also try to rescue some version of ambition and wanting to do a whole bunch of stuff and not wanting to say that the way to deal with all of that, those issues is to just kind of get to some blissed out stage where you just passively float around and don't do anything.
- [15:04]
A
Two reactions to this First, I think some people listening might be interested in productivity and getting things done and think, well, recognizing my problems are impossible doesn't help me solve them. And I think that's wrong. I think that understanding what is impossible in fact makes clear to us what is possible. So, for example, to make this very, very literal, this past year was a really, really busy year for me and my family. Our daughter is 16 months old, so she's an enormous amount of work on any given week. Despite being an extraordinary joy. We moved from Washington D.C. to Chapel Hill, North Carolina for my wife's work. I finished co writing a book. I finished writing this feature for the Atlantic magazine that's coming out next year. There was a period where I thought I needed to finish the feature by August, also be a good father, also be a good husband, also see my friends, also get good sleep. That's impossible. I needed to wake up and realize that's impossible. And once I realized that that was impossible and my co author, Ezra Klein, realized that that was impossible, we could talk about, wait, maybe we can think of another deadline for the book. Maybe I can write the feature and finish it in another month. And that if we change certain deadlines and if we rearrange certain timescales, then I can see that these things can all be done in the finitude of time. And so recognizing what is impossible in your life is actually a critical step toward taking action toward what is possible. That's the first point I really want to make. The second is that I was reading your book this week on the couch next to my wife, who was taking care of some of her clinical psychology work. And I read this passage to her and I said, does this idea of making your burdens too heavy to carry, does it have a place in the clinical literature? Like, do you have a word for this insight? And she said something so interesting to me that I want to bounce off of you. She said that with patients who struggle with gad, Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, ocd, they often try to throw logic at the problem of their anxiety or to throw thinking at the problem of their anxiety. And they therefore find themselves in an endless dialogue in their heads. So to take a very simple example, let's say a patient with OCD washes her hands compulsively. One way to explain what's happening there is that no amount of hand washing can provide her sufficient certainty that her hands are clean. So one thing you could say to this person is, you know, Julie, you're being ridiculous. You've washed your hand nine times, they're clean, move on with life. It turns out that's not very useful and only the worst therapists try to do that. Brute forcing certainty onto people who are anxious doesn't work, in part because you're lying to them. Right. The truth is she'll never know if her hands are clean enough. The OCD patient is right. There will always be a risk that she washes her hands 20 times, wipes it on a towel with germs and walks away from the sink with dirty hands. You can never play the game of germ destroying. Whack a mole perfectly. You'll always lose. It's worse than you think. But once you accept that, you'll always lose the hand washing game, ironically, you win the much bigger game. You win the game of life, which is the game of. And this, I believe, is the clinical psych term, tolerating uncertainty. Uncertainty tolerance is so key to people with anxiety like OCD and gad, because it is the trick that gets them around the game of constantly trying to talk themselves into a certainty that can never be fully had. And I wonder how that clinical psych gloss on making the burden too heavy to carry sits with you.
- [19:02]
B
Oh, I mean, it's so well put. And not for the first time, I feel like you, or maybe in this case your wife, put my ideas more eloquently.
- [19:09]
A
This is absolutely my. My wife is not going to be very happy if she hears me claiming these ideas to be mine alone. This was very much her doing.
- [19:18]
B
Please continue. Yeah, I think that, yeah, absolutely, that the idea here is that there's far more power in any degree of learning to tolerate the openness of life. In this sense, that's what some sort of people in the Zen tradition might phrase it than there is in trying to sort of reach the Closure. Because one of these is impossible and the other, every single little bit that you manage is a little bit more purchase you have on the world. It's a little bit more tractability. And maybe someone with an extremely severe anxiety disorder only manages to get a tiny little bit more purchase on life. But it's everything, right? I mean, it's everything compared to the pure fantasy of one day getting the total control. And I think this comes up in all sorts of contexts. I mean, I resonate with it very personally in the context of sort of just the most obvious. All the examples of just having too much to do are always that seem to me to be the most sort of obvious examples of what we're talking about here. Not the only ones, but. But being able to focus on making some progress on a few tasks that matter to you or that are important to your work in a world where there is so much nagging at your attention absolutely requires that you have some ability to sort of be okay with all those buzzing things existing in the world and nonetheless, for now, place your attention on the thing you want to place it on. As opposed to what I think a lot of us do instinctively, which is first of all try to get rid of all the little buzzing things so that we then get the alleged acres of completely spare and empty time that are going to come later. So again, it's this ability to sort of be okay with all of these facts. And when you were saying before about co writing the book and how when you faced the limitations, you were able to figure out how to get these things done, I would say totally that's absolutely true. But also, even if you were in a situation where it actually wasn't possible to meet all the goals that you need, where something had to be jettisoned, where some project just had to be let go, in a sense that loss, that trade off was already there. It's inherent in the situation and when you become conscious of it, it enables you to make the wisest kind of trade offs. And sometimes that's going to involve not doing things that you wanted to do, but it's going to enable you to focus on the things you do decide to do instead of that kind of that thing that is so common, I think is so familiar to so many people in the contemporary world, which is that feeling of not being able to focus on what you're doing because some part of your brain is actually fretting about all the other things you should be doing with that time.
- [22:06]
A
I really wanted to make that connection because I think there are some ways in which people, not you necessarily, but other people, put self help in the category of enhancement, strong people getting stronger, while they put therapy in the category of broken people trying to put themselves back together again. And in fact, I think the central insights here are deeply resonant. Right? The wisdom of cognitive behavioral therapy is not opposed to the wisdom of stoicism or existentialism. It's another door, it's another window into the same house. And because I'm interested in all of this in philosophy and in psychology, I always think it's interesting to read work like yours and see how these far flung ideas can end up sharing the same space. So moving along from burdens too heavy to carry to managing our time. Something I don't know that I've asked you about is schedules. So I am a super scheduler. I schedule everything. I schedule work, obviously, I schedule the gym. I schedule my lunch. If you look at my calendar, you see like, this is when I want to eat lunch. I schedule my leisure time. I schedule time with my wife. I schedule my unscheduled time. I leave blank spaces, but I highlight blank spaces to say, this is. Here's the white space in my day. I don't think I've ever asked you about whether or not you think I'm doing this wrong. Are you someone who dislikes schedules because they can often reflect unrealistic expectations or ambitions of our productivity? Or are you someone who looks at schedules and say, aha, this is a tool for forcing us to consider our lives as discrete and finite chunks of time? Pro schedules, anti schedules, what say you?
- [24:03]
B
I have just been on such a journey with schedules. That's the sort of the way to put it. I. I certainly don't think you're doing it wrong if it works for you. My history with this was that I was always somebody who wanted to try to schedule things precisely. And this always led to one or another kinds of, kind of internal struggles. Either I would feel bad for not being able to stick to the schedule because life collided with it and got in the way, or I would succeed, at least superficially, in the sense that I would stick to the schedule and I would find very swiftly that there was something kind of totally lifeless and airless about experience. Once I was just sort of plodding through the following the instructions that past me had laid out for present me to follow. I think that like a lot of tools, and I make this point in the new book, you know, the crucial thing here is whether the rule or the technique or whatever is serving you or whether you're ending up serving the rule. Possibly you've just had a much healthier attitude towards this all along, which is admirable. But in my case, it was necessary to really practice letting go of scheduling because of this effect that I always found, because I was always using it in a sort of unconscious way to try to exert a degree of control over the unfolding of my time that I think is just not realistic. So I have moved much more to a kind of, you know, there's some light scheduling in what I do. I schedule sort of certain chunks of time to make sure that I'm not making appointments in that time so that it's available for me to do focused, creative work. I schedule certain things that we do as a family so that, you know, they make sure they really happen. But for me, the challenge has always been, or is increasingly, let's say, to. To sort of stay present enough to make useful, intuitive choices and wise, intuitive choices in the moment instead of slipping into this kind of following the plan system, which, as I say, either doesn't work or does work, and then doesn't work in a different way. So I'm fascinated to ask you whether is it just that you're holding them very lightly if something overruns and you're happy for it to overrun, you think, okay, that's not on my schedule. So the day unfolds this way. Instead, it's just like, what is it then? If it's not a strict plan for your day, Is it an aspiration or just a sort of rough guideline or what's going on?
- [26:52]
A
I love the idea of schedules held lightly, and I think that's how at my best, I try to think about my weekly schedule is that, yeah, this is an ambition, it's a plan. But plans are made to be destroyed. And every day there's some kind of wrecking ball that comes in and destroys some aspect of the plan that I write for myself. And so there's really no fear or pain in saying, this is the second most important thing that I want to do today. And then the day blows up and I cross it off and Thursday's activity becomes Friday's activity. So it's, you know, what's the concept that sometimes people say strong hypotheses, weekly held, It's a little bit like that. But for scheduling strong schedules, weekly held, it's fascinating.
- [27:43]
B
I don't want to make a tasteless comparison because I don't think that my struggles with sort of productivity addictions are comparable to substance addictions really. But it is the sort of. There is some sort of analogy here between the person who can drink moderately and the person who just has to forswear these things because they're going to go too far in one of the bad directions that they take you.
- [28:10]
A
Interesting. I never thought about my ambivalence toward my own schedule as being a sign of moderation. It might be. What I find really useful about being very explicit about how I want to spend my day is that especially now that I have a young kid, there's certain time that's just non negotiable for stopping work. Like she has to go to daycare, I have to cook her dinner, we're going to sit down as a like, it is practically an iron law of family habit that we have dinner together. So at 4:45, if I've promised my editor that I'm delivering 1500 words on whatever topic and it's just not ready, that's just too bad because it's 4:45 and Isla needs to be picked up from the daycare and so I'm just out the door. And I find that being very explicit about parts of the day that are etched in stone, I am leaving the house at 4:45 to pick up my daughter versus other days being written in pen and ink where I can just cross them off and move them to the next day. I do find that that level of being able to visualize everything that I have to do is incredibly useful so that I can make a decision in the moment of what to give up, if that makes sense. And sometimes there's just too many balls in the air for me to be able to make those decisions without being able to look at a piece of paper and say what's expendable here? So that I'm having dinner with my daughter and not working through dinner. That's sort of the way that I think about schedules. In a weird way, it goes right back to what you described as the overarching theme of 4,000 weeks. That there is a surprising amount of freedom that can be discovered in articulating our own limitations. And a schedule to your point is interesting because it both represents impossible ambition and discrete limitations. It's a time bound illustration of what we hope to accomplish. And I find that I get that I enjoy a certain amount of unclenched freedom from being able to look at everything I have to do and then saying nope, nope, nope at the end of the day. So that's why schedules work for me. But I Take your point that there are certainly some periods of life where my relationship with scheduling book is a relationship of pure hate that definitely happens.
- [30:46]
B
I think it comes down to this question of whether a rule is serving you or you're ending up sort of in servitude to the rule. So, yeah, I'm in favor of any productivity technique that is not pursued as if it's going to somehow be your salvation. And I feel like I've been able to let them back into my life in a gradual way. Not so much scheduling, but others now that I've broadly gone through that very positive disillusionment process of not thinking that they're going to get me out of the human condition.
- [31:19]
A
There's another piece of this that I think is really important, which is that there's an enormous amount of good work that can be done in a surprisingly small amount of time. And something that you mention in your book that I've always found fascinating is that we have today various reports, I hope they're true, of the work habits of famous writers and scientists. And it's really remarkable the degree to which their famous productivity was bound to a very small amount of time, often just three to four hours a day. And I want to quote a passage from your book and then spin it back to you. You write, quote. It's a little unnerving, to be honest, how frequently this specific range of hours crops up in historical accounts of the daily routines of art, authors, scientists, composers and others. Charles Darwin concentrated for two 90 minute periods and one 1 hour period each day. Virginia Woolf wrote for 3 1/2 hours after a leisurely breakfast. The mathematician Henri Poincare focused intensely from 10 to 12 in the morning and from 5 to 7 in the evening, then called it a day. Charles Dickens, Thomas Jefferson, Alice Munro, JG Ballard, all engaged in focused work for a similar stretch of time, as did Anthony Trollop, who claim, somewhat irritatingly, that he managed to write 250 words every 15 minutes during the three hour stint he put in each morning before heading to his job at the post office. End quote. Now, assuming for our limited purposes that these reports are accurate, because the claims cannot be Fact checked in 2024, 2025. What do you think is so special about three hours?
- [33:07]
B
It's such a good question. I want to give some credit here, as I do in the book, to Alex Pang in his book Rest, where he's really gone very deep into some of the records and the research around this. I think that, I think there are a few different things going on 1. And I don't sort of have the kind of neurophysiological expertise here, but I'm pretty sure that there are sort of processes that are exhausted when it comes to sort of deep cogitation and that need replenishment. I think something else that's going on is clearly that, you know, as we know now for sure, a huge amount of important work in any kind of activity involving reflection, thinking goes on when you're not focusing consciously and sort of actively and aggressively on it. And then there's just this idea that. And I think this is where I think this is relevant for people today. Obviously a lot of these figures, when you look at that, you read about all their different schedules, you realize that they had sort of huge legions of servants to handle all the other things in life that enabled them to only spend three or four hours a day working and then spend the rest of the time at leisure. My argument is not that we can afford to do that, but that it's really useful to. If you have the autonomy over your time in your professional situation, it's really useful not to try to ring fence much more than about three to four hours. So I think what this represents for me, especially as I use it, is a really realistic sense, at least for many of us, of how much, to what extent we can really expect in a useful way to dictate how the day unfolds. So I both find that I cannot in my career, but also that I wouldn't want to account for exactly what's going to happen between 8 in the morning and 5:36 in the afternoon. That involves too much sort of my attempting to dictate what all the people who I work with at some remove are going to do, when they're going to need things from me, when I'm going to need things from them. But that sort of three to four hours, it feels practical. It's something that there is a real hope of protecting. And then of course, as soon as you can do that, as we all know, anyone who does anything sort of remotely creative in their work, the compounding effects are just staggering every time. I mean, the difference between being able to put in two, three, four hours to a large ongoing piece of writing for weeks on end, as opposed to doing kind of eight 10 hour marathons and then not coming back to it for multiple days because you're exhausted, is incredible. One last thing I think is that there's some real benefit in keeping the sort of scale of that kind of work. It's hard to express, but like not setting it up in our minds as so huge and all encompassing that it's kind of intimidating or just a bit repulsive. I think there's lots of good evidence from work on the psychology of writing, for example, that actually people who. People who set themselves a certain period of time to write in and then stop when the time is up and keep that modest, there's something that makes that much more sustainable in a life because you don't sort of build it up. The mental image of the work is not built up into this kind of huge dragon that you've got to slay every day. So there's something really sort of sustainable about it as well.
- [37:02]
A
There's an ironic way in which this concept of deep work has a twin concept in its opposite opposite, which is sleep. That our most restful periods of sleep in REM aren't the entire time that we spend in bed, those seven, eight hours, but only a handful of hours when the most important neuropsychological biological functions are happening to restore our brain and body activity. And I find that continuing this metaphor between work and sleep the same way I need to romance myself into sleep. I sit down, I turn on a dull light, I'll read a little bit, I'll allow myself to feel drowsy, then the head goes to pillow, then I slowly fall asleep, then I enter rem. There's a similar self romancing that's required to get into deep work too, I find, for myself, and I think that's true for other people, that you don't sit, you know, like go from breakfast to either the room that you work in your house or commute to work instead of the desk at the office. You don't immediately fall into super deep work. You have to open the computer, you click around a bit, you feel your way back into the groove of things, you move your fingers around the keyboard, and eventually you enter this period where you can say, all right, I'm ready to really focus. I think there's something circadian about this. I feel like I enter that period around late morning into early afternoon. That's when whatever forces come together to give me what I need for deep focus are really at my disposal. Do you find that you have a certain period of the day where for whatever reason, the sort of the cellular arsenal of Oliver Berkman comes together to give you access to that deep focus at the same, same period of every workday?
- [39:05]
B
I do. But it's a really interesting echo of our differences about schedules as well, because that Time for me has always been early morning. So I think if I lived an existence completely unshaped by other people, it'd be sort of terrible actually. But then I would probably it might be as early as half past five or something that I was working each day and by the early afternoon I would be completely the chance of anything productive happening after that time would be off the agenda. And I've found it to be quite a challenge, but I think a really useful and sort of growth oriented one since becoming parent eight years ago to sort of not be wedded to that again. I think that if it's something that it's really useful to recognize it, it's really useful to shape your day around it to whatever extent you can. But I've noticed a few different people in the sort of personal development self help space online at the moment, talking in other contexts as well about how any kind of routine or ritual can become. It can go from being something that sort of puts you into your best mode to a prerequisite that you find it very difficult to work without. So the challenge for me has certainly been saying, well, okay, it's quarter to 11 and I'm only just getting down to the real business of the day. And there's something about that that I find so internally grating. It's like, oh, there's something awful about the idea of all the time under the bridge. It's quarter to 11. I could just about manage 9am because that feels like another sort of culturally reinforced start time. But quarter to 11, what are you going to do? And actually the power, the ability, the willingness to just sort of fall into an hour or two's useful work, then, even though it didn't go according to my rhythms, that's where the growth is for me at the moment.
- [41:16]
A
You're reminding me of one of my favorite, absolutely least favorite genres of TikTok video, which is the viral morning routine where you'll often see a man, typically a handsome, well built guy, wake up alone in bed, take off his eye mask, begin 17 different personal health routines that involve a cold plunge and a sauna and 45 minutes of uninterrupted working out, probably listening to some incredibly edifying classical music or self help podcast. He has a facial routine that goes on for 90 minutes, et cetera, et cetera. And whenever I see these videos, I think two things. The first is there's no way this individual has a child. And the second is not only did these individuals typically not have children, they often don't have anyone in their life. The videos are of an individual alone. There's a total absence of other people. And it's easy to be precious about our visions of our future, better self. I will next year, in 2025, I will go to the gym every single day and I will work out without fail or without pause for 40 minutes. And I will be this productive at work and I will eat better in this way. And I can't do these things now because of all these interruptions in. In my life. And of course, to your point, I'm probably just paraphrasing or maybe even plagiarizing you. Life is just interruptions. Life is not the journey out of interruptions. It is just one interruption after another. And we tell ourselves these hopeless lies when we pretend that we'll one day have these precious visions of our perfect selves in a world without interruptions. That ain't happening. Certainly young fatherhood is nothing but a series of interruptions. And honestly, the interruptions aren't probably best defined as interruptions. It's just fatherhood. And fatherhood is its own blessing. Two more points I want to hit with you before we go. One is you have this lovely observation that everything in life is either a good time or a good story. And I would love for you to unpack what this adage means to you.
- [43:47]
B
Yeah, I certainly didn't coin it. It's sort of lost in time, as far as I know. And it's not everything, right? Because I think that there are clearly experiences that happen to people that are certainly not a good time because they're tragic and appalling and they are not a good story either. They're not funny to talk about later. Although, say more about that. But the basic idea here is just that pretty much everything that happens to you in the run of an ordinary day or an ordinary week, an ordinary month, is either enjoyable, it goes well, it's satisfying, it's an experience that is fun or absorbing to have, or it's meaningful to you in some sense, however modest. Or when it goes wrong, when things don't go as planned, there's something positive about that. There's something enlivening and enriching. And so the classic case in the saying is that you get to sort of dine out on it, right? You get to sort of tell a story about it. I have a friend who really vividly remembers this moment from her childhood when her parents took her and her sisters out to a long planned picnic and they got it all ready to go, and then just as they were about to start eating, the heavens opened and they all got completely soaked in the rain, but the parents let them carry on eating and they just got completely sodden. And it's like one of her fondest memories of childhood. And I don't think she would say the whole of her childhood was sort of idyllic at all. Right. There are these pinpoints of things that were. Were the good bits. And in this case, it's a good bit. Precisely because it didn't follow a plan, precisely because it just sort of slipped out of control. And I don't think that's a coincidence. I think there's something very profound here about the relationship between the control that we think we want over life and then the joy and humour and just general sense of vibrancy that we get from things that don't go according to plan. And it's not only about things going wrong in that sense. Right. It's also just like if you look back at your own biography and you think about the pivotal moments, the time when you met somebody and that turned into this and that and that, or you moved as a kid to a different city and that was the beginning of xyz. All the things, almost always, anyway, the things that we sort of credit with bringing us whatever aspects of our lives there are that we really appreciate and value today, they weren't planned. They weren't things that we set out to put into practice and then they happened exactly as we wanted them to. They are unplanned and serendipitous and coincidental. So there's this very interesting duality where we sort of look forward into life, trying to control as much as we can and make it go the way we want it to go. But if you look back at your life, a huge amount of what seems positive, or at least just funny to remember, didn't follow that. Didn't follow that at all.
- [46:50]
A
What that passage made me think is that we often turn to movies and stories to serve as secular myths to teach us how to live and what's important in life and what values we should hold most dearly. And the irony is that every good myth tends to be a story about loss of control. Every good story tends to involve loss of control. And yet the irony, of course, is that we spend our lives fruitlessly trying to control the chaos of everything swirling around us. One thing it made me think of as well is that you'll sometimes be in these situations where probably more, when people are younger and they're being introduced to some New class or company or division, where everyone goes around in a circle and tells some story about their life. Tell us a funny story about your life. And no one's story tends to be the sort of thing you would hope would happen to that person the next day. Right. So, for example, the story that I always used to tell in these circumstances was when I was in college, my parents took me to China, and when we were in the outer Gobi Desert in northern China, I came down with what's called Bell's palsy. And Bell's palsy is a condition that I believe is still mysterious to most doctors. But they think what happens is that an inner ear infection causes a nerve inflammation that knocks out nerve control to half of a person's face, such that half of their face becomes paralyzed. And among older adults for whom Bell's palsy is more common, their face can even droop because their muscles lose their strength. And so that side of the face begins to droop. I got Bell's palsy in the middle of a Chinese desert in 2005, where the nearest modern hospital was God only knows how far away. I was a hypochondriac at the time, a classic condition of Reform Jews of my age and type. I thought I was dying. I had a miserable time the next few days as my face slowly lost its ability to control itself. In fact, when I tried to fall asleep, my eyelids couldn't close on their own, so I would have to pin my shut eyelid against my pillow pillow just to fall asleep. Some people with Bell's palsy actually tape their eyelids shut because they lose the ability to close it. So I come to school the next fall, my Bell's palsy having been basically cured or it fixes itself. I don't think there's a. Typically, there's a known cure other than steroids. And what do I have in my back pocket but the best possible summer story. Everyone else is like, I interned for an investment bank and I went and my parents took me you to Italy. Oh, that's neat. I got Bell's palsy in the middle of a Chinese desert and I couldn't close my eye to fall asleep. Way more interesting story to tell 19 year olds over a bad beer at a theater party. So it's lovely. Sometimes it's very difficult to operationalize this in your own life, especially in real time. But it is lovely to kind of have the facility with cognitive time travel to say at any given moment that you're suffering just a little bit. If I survive this and I very well will survive it. It's going to make an incredible chapter one of a story to tell and entertain people and by the way, entertain myself as I tell it, very, very hard to pull that into a moment when anyone is suffering the pain of Bell's palsy or any other kind of uncertainty. But I do love this idea that if you're not having a good time, you can tell yourself that you're having the beginning of a good story. I do think it's a lovely, I guess what my wife would call lovely cognitive reframe.
- [50:43]
B
Yeah, no, I'm with you on that. I think it is really difficult to retain an awareness of these things in the moment. But it's. Yeah, absolutely.
- [50:55]
A
The very last point that I want to talk to you about is that your book is chockablock with quotes from Marcus Aurelius Meditations, which is one of the Ur texts of Roman Stoicism. And for my birthday this year, my wife bought me a copy of Marcus Aurelius Meditations, which I've been flipping through and dog earing. And I wanted to close by just reading you my favorite quote from Marcus Aurelius that I read this year because you seem to be an enormous fan of his wisdom. And it is truly remarkable that this guy, while serving as the emperor of Rome, also found time to write in a personal journal that he couldn't have imagined people would read 2,000 years later, words of really surprisingly deep wisdom. And so let me give you this quote, which is my favorite of his observations, and you can tell me what it shakes up in you. Take the view from above. Look at the thousands of flocks and herds, the thousands of human ceremonies, every sort of voyage in storm or calm, the range of creation, combination, extinction. Consider too, the lives once lived by others long before you, the lives that will be lived after you, the lives lived now among foreign tribes, and how many have never even heard your name? And how many will soon forget it, and how many may praise you now but quickly turn to blame? Reflect that neither memory nor fame nor anything else at all has any importance worth thinking of. End quote. It ends in an interestingly strange direction there, but I would love to know what you take from that passage.
- [52:51]
B
Yeah, well, firstly, of course, it's partly an articulation of that famous Stoic idea of the dichotomy of control. The idea that there's something important about staying aware of what the things are in our worlds that we can exert some influence over and what we can't, and not attempting to sort of meddle too much in the. In the parts that we can't. But more than that, I mean, that whole sort of zooming out exercise, both spatially and temporally, to me it's a kind of fascinating reminder of. I mean, I facetiously, in 4,000 weeks called it cosmic insignificance therapy. Right. The idea that there's something incredibly relaxing and sort of calm bringing about considering one's smallness in the scheme of things. And it's kind of striking that that should be the case because it suggests by implication that the rest of the time, perhaps part of the reason that we're stressing ourselves out so much is because we are according ourselves a sort of vastly disproportionate central role in the unfolding of history, which kind of, you know, Marcus Aurelius had grounds for doing in a way. Right. Rather more than I do. But that sort of egocentrism that makes you feel, in a sort of unquestioned way. And I don't think I'm a terribly sort of pathological narcissist or anything. I think it's pretty common that on some level the whole of history has been leading up to my lifespan. And on some level, whether or not I do certain actions or disappoint certain people is incredibly, you know, significant. There's a huge amount will follow from it one way or the other. There's something very, very relaxing about realizing how far that isn't the case, that I'm just a tiny speck of consciousness in the eons of history. But more than that, I guess it really asks for me anyway. It asks us to reconsider what are the criteria by which we are judging the things we do to be meaningful. Right? Because it sort of says to me, it says, well, look, if something's only in some sense worth doing if it echoes down the centuries or affects millions and millions of people, and I think we do have that idea embedded quite deep in us or at least deep in the culture. Well, then a sort of, firstly, a meaningful life would seem to be beyond almost everybody, which is. Which is ridiculous on its face. And then secondly, all sorts of things that we know to be meaningful, like cooking dinner for our kids or whatever it is, sort of get ruled out from that idea. So I just think it's a really useful reminder both that, you know, that thing you're worrying about is probably not very important, won't even be very important to you in a few years time, let alone, you know, 200 years from now. And also That a lot of what you are doing already in your life might be a totally meaningful and enriching and important way to be spending your time instead of constantly having these sort of ambitions that torment us about things not yet done.
- [56:16]
A
There's a beautiful way in which it's in keeping with the very first thing that you said in this interview, which is that there's an ironic freedom that comes from recognizing our limitations. There's also an ironic embiggening of the self that comes from recognizing our smallness in a weird way. Like when something gnaws at us, whether it's an anxious thought or it's rumination, or it's regret, or it's jealousy, or it's rage, right? Whatever gnawing stuck thought that is, it becomes our whole world, right? The painful thought becomes the whole world. But ironically, to have this perspective, to remember how big the world is, how small you are, how big time is, how small 4,000 weeks is. In a weird way, when we shrink ourselves, we also shrink the fear and we shrink the anxiety and we shrink the gnawing thought. And it's ourself. That weirdly comes away from the exercise feeling bigger and the pain feeling smaller. It's a little bit like reading this passage triggers the same feeling in me that I get from a sense of sublime awe when I look at a beautiful large mountain or something in nature whose scale makes me feel small relative to it. There's a weird way in which that experience both makes you feel small and makes you feel grand at the same time. And that really shouldn't make any sense. And yet it does make sense. And there's a therapy in the sense that it makes. And so that's really what I take from this passage and really from all sort of awe inspiring experiences too. Is that very strange, almost Berkmanian irony between feeling small and feeling big at the same time?
- [58:06]
B
Yeah, yeah. I think that's a wonderful way of putting it. And I think a another way of putting it that comes to me is that it is about sort of stepping out of the self in some sense. It's about stepping out of our sort of a very immediate, constraining concerns with ourselves, but stepping more fully into reality, right? It's like it's showing up more for life. I think there is that sort of feeling of aliveness. We don't have better words for it than that. I don't think that is ultimately what we're aiming for here. And that is so present in an experience of awe. And it's present in an experience of insignificance against a large landscape or against the sort of eons of cosmic time. And I think ultimately, that is what we're here for, right? To sort of show up as fully as possible for as much of it.
- [59:03]
A
Oliver Berkman, thank you very much.
- [59:06]
B
Oh, it's been a real pleasure.
- [59:08]
A
Thank you for listening. Plain English is hosted, written and researched by me, Derek Thompson, produced by Devin Beraldi in 2025. We are coming back to you with our regular schedule of 2ish episodes per week. We've got some awesome features cooking. We're very excited to share them with you. Thanks for listening as always. And if, if you like what you hear, give us five stars on whatever podcast platform you listen to. Talk to you soon. Sa.